Ignited (Roman Holiday 5)

“Then I’ll see you in the morning.”

She smiled. “Yeah. See you in the morning.”

When she got up to go, the glow from the embers briefly lit the back of her legs orange-gold all the way up to the hem of her shorts, and then she walked into shadow, opened the trailer door, and he lost her.

CHAPTER SIX

“Roman. It’s about time.” Carmen stepped over a puddle of rainwater in the parking lot and picked her way down the path of round stone pavers to the Sunnyvale office building. “I tried to get you yesterday.”

“I’m at a campground. No cell service. I’m calling on the office phone now.”

She rested her clipboard on the porch rail, wishing Roman had left the keys with her so she didn’t have to wait for Noah. “Hmm? Oh. Sure. Listen, there’s only one thing I need to hear from you this morning, and that’s ‘Yes, Carmen, you can go ahead with the demo. I got the crazy woman under control.’ ” She peered through the narrow vertical window set into the middle of the door.

Still dark. No sign of Noah at the site yet, but all the demolition equipment waited in the lot, which was free of debris. He’d done what she asked him to do.

He would be here soon, and she planned to be gone within five minutes. All she needed was the go-ahead from Roman. She’d listen to Noah’s plan for the knockdown, approve it, and get back on the road to Miami.

She wouldn’t stick around to discover whether the strange affliction that had come over her the last time she saw Roman’s contractor would afflict her a second time.

That would be a bad idea, particularly considering how many times she’d indulged her affliction in bed recently. Fully nude. Imagining this strange man’s stiff tongue against her clit, she’d brought herself to one fierce, almost painful orgasm after another.

She’d had more orgasms in the past five days than in the entire previous year. Which, fine. Nothing wrong with masturbation, and sometimes you smacked into a trigger that made you want to do it more often than normal. So Noah was a trigger for her. Life was strange.

“Carmen?”

“What?”

“I need to talk to you about our relationship.”

You have a relationship with my father, she almost said. I’m an afterthought.

It was possible that she was angri

er with Roman than she’d been willing to admit.

It was also possible that her anger was one explanation for her endless willingness to imagine what a bristled chin would feel like, scraping over her bare sex.

At the sound of Noah’s truck in the lot, she looked up, alert and far more eager than she should be.

“What about our relationship?” she asked.

“I’m ending it,” he said.

It didn’t surprise her. She’d seen it coming, predicted it after that last, pathetic phone call.

She hadn’t predicted that she would feel this … this what?

She needed her clipboard. Her arms felt empty without it, her heart undefended.

When she picked it up off the porch rail, Noah stepped out of his truck, and it was as though she didn’t belong to her body at all. As though she were a pair of eyes, unfocused, and if she kept her gaze soft, she would separate in two, feelings and being, and everything would simplify that had become too complex.

Noah grinned in the most unseemly way and waved his arm back and forth. He was a Labrador of a man. Big and ungainly, with too much enthusiasm. Probably not very bright.

She shouldn’t approve of him. Shouldn’t feel so relieved to see him.

She shouldn’t be clutching her clipboard so tightly when she’d seen this coming and had already decided not to be upset by it.

Stick to the script, she admonished herself.